30–50 GHz high‐gain CMOS UWB LNA

Abstract

A 30-50 GHz CMOS ultra-wideband (UWB) low-noise amplifier (LNA) with a flat high power gain (S 21), along with a flat low-noise figure (NF) is demonstrated for the Atacama large millimetre array (ALMA) band-1 (31.3-45 GHz) system applications. The high S 21 and low NF are achieved because the triple-well transistors are utilised with their respective source and body terminals connected together. Furthermore, the bandwidth extension and gain flatness is achieved due to the careful design of the inductive-peaking networks. The LNA has a measured S 21 of 21.5 ± 1.5 dB, a minimum NF (NF min) of 3.8 dB at 32.5 GHz, an average NF (NF avg) of 4.67 dB over the range of 30-50 GHz and an input third-order intercept point (IIP3) of 0 dBm, with a DC power consumption of 20.4 mW at 1.2 V supply. The proposed LNA outperforms all the reported commercial standard CMOS Q-band LNAs, with the highest gain bandwidth product and highest IIP3 suitable for the ALMA band-1 system applications.

Ultrawideband LNA 1960–2019: Review

“…During the 1970s-1990s, engineers usually tried to fabricate integrated wideband amplifiers by utilising the BJT, MESFET, BiFET, HEMT, MOS, CMOS and BiCMOS technologies. In the 2000s, they chiefly focussed on the CMOS, BiCMOS and HEMT processes to design integrated wideband and ultrawideband LNAs, and also, they proposed different solutions such as shunt feedback technique to control gain, bandwidth and noise, common gate topology to realise wideband input [86,88,132,134,142,149,171,174,176,202,206,207,211,214,217,244,250,251,256,262,264,268,277,285,290,298,302,303,308,310,311,321,327,341,349,360] Gain � BW/P dc � (NF − 1) Or 20log 10 134,141,206,213,217,218,231,251,277,290,…”

“…Frequency response of the active inductor load [121] F I G U R E 2 4 Schematic of the proposed inductorless differential low noise amplifier [121] carried out by focussing on improving the mentioned topologies and techniques which were presented in the 2000s for wideband LNA. As examples, we can refer to 'the noise/ distortion cancelation topologies' [164, 167, 173, 181, 189, 192, 194, 195, 201, 212, 216, 218, 220, 226, 227, 232, 233, 235, 236, 247, 254, 257-259, 266, 267, 270, 275-277, 282, 283, 287, 290, 291, 295, 298, 302, 305-307, 309, 312, 314, 317, 322, 326-328, 335, 338, 349-351, 355, 357], 'the g m -boosting topology' [164, 167, 168, 172, 176, 181, 184, 192, 194, 195, 206, 208, 209, 212, 213, 225, 227, 228, 232, 233, 236, 250, 252, 256, 266, 267, 273-277, 282, 285-287, 290, 291, 298, 302, 305-307, 309, 314, 317, 321, 326, 327, 338, 346, 349], 'the inductive peaking topology' [165,167,173,185,207,260,262,288,290,309,311,349,353], 'the current-reused technique' [174,185,188,206,225,228,274,276,285,290,298,306,315,337,338,346,349,355] and 'the AI technique' [164,179,22...…”

“…But ‘notch filter technique’ was a new idea for wideband LNA in the 2010s to reject interferers [161, 164, 196, 283] and that was called IRLNA (Interfere Rejection LNA) [196, 283]. Most of studies in this decade were carried out as a CMOS process because of its scaling successes: the CMOS [161, 162, 164, 165, 167–173, 176–182, 184, 185, 188–190, 192–196, 199–212, 214–221, 223, 225–236, 238, 240, 242–252, 254, 256–262, 264, 266–268, 270, 271, 273–277, 282, 283, 285–293, 295, 298, 302–309,…”

“…Considering the works of 2010s, [161–200, 201–250, 251–300, 301–361] it seems that optimum ultrawideband designs in the BiCMOS, the CMOS and the HEMT technologies are allocated to [305, 337, 345], respectively. In 2017, Ch.…”

Design of a high performance narrowband low noise amplifier using an on-chip orthogonal series stacked differential fractal inductor for 5G applications

“…Furthermore, shunt-resistive feedback [18,19] and current reuse [20,21] techniques have good performance in terms of NF but they are not stable and have a large input/output impedance issue. The cascode LNA circuit topology with inductive source degeneration has better input matching, high gain, good stability, and low NF [22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. The on-chip inductor implementation of LNA reduces the spectral noise and provides good input and output matching [29,30].…”